Tora
by Ryuujin Shishou
Summary: There was something about the woman that separated her from all others in the Wizarding world. And it wasn't just her odd hair, or dangerous knives either. AU One-Shot HP/Naru crossover, hinted HarryGinny


_**Hello, hello!**_

_**Well, here's a short One-shot that I wrote some time ago that I thought I should share with you all.**_

_**Hinted canon pairings – slight NaruSaku if you squint. **_

_**I own neither Naruto nor Harry Potter (which is why I write **__Fan Fiction__** in the first place) and the plot is probably not original; there are thousands of fics out there and the chances that there are none which resemble this even the slightest are incredibly slim. **__**SO, THE IDEA OF THIS IS PROBABLY NOT MINE EITHER.**_

**Edit**_**: **_**Corrected some misspellings**

_**Tora**_

"_You may call me Tora."_

That was the only thing that people had managed to get her to say about herself, in all the years that the Wizarding World had known of the strange woman. Thousands of people were bound to have passed through her simple little wooden house in the middle of the forest of some lonely place in England, yet the only thing they could tell, was her appearance and her ability to heal any wound presented to her.

There was only one place in the world, where you could truly feel that you were standing on completely neutral ground. It was the only place where you could ever expect two death enemies to meet without being able to lift a finger, or utter one word to each other. For Tora was quick to anger and prone to lashing out, that much was known to all those who had ever dared break her rule of Neutrality.

Tora was different from anyone he had ever met before. She had almost one hundred years ago (according to the rumors of the magical world, it was much more than a hundred) opened her home in a far away, backwater forest where no one should ever have stumbled upon her. Yet people in need were drawn to her like bees to honey and flies to the lights. She was the only person who offered to heal anyone who sought her out; without asking for names, information or payment. She wasn't interested in knowing who they were, how or why they had received their injuries or why they hadn't gone to someone else. She didn't allow anyone she treated to try to pay her – waving of any fear of owing a Life Dept_. "I don't do those kind of things, dumbass",_ she would say indifferently, sending you a reprimanding glance as you squirmed in your bed despite the strict orders to keep completely still_. "I'm no wizard and you are no… me. There are no Debts here, stupid."_ As if you were supposed to know better.

She could be a mother hen for any of her patient, dotting on them if they needed it, or she could be keeping silent and treating them before letting them go their own ways, pretending to have never met or heard of them; it all depended on the individual she was taking care of. She could make soft small talk, or chew you out if you stepped out of line or misbehaved. _"My house"_, she would say, twirling one of those frightening daggers in her hand nonchalantly_, "my rules."_

The first time Harry had met her, had really been a freak coincidence. The first time, they had been carrying Ron around after he was splinched, when they had stumbled upon her small house. She had been standing completely still in the open doorway, as if simply waiting for them. She had lifted a brow at them as they froze upon the sight of her, as if amused by their reactions.

_"Aren't you going to get inside, wizards?"_ she had asked in a soft voice that logically should not have been able to carry all the way to them. But it had, and they had glanced at each other, no one willing to trust the stranger who had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a forest.

_"That seems to hurt. Get in here, and I'll have a look at it."_ She had been expecting them to follow her inside. They had, slowly and hesitantly. They found her sitting at the end of a white bed inside of the door, and they all exchanged looks before letting Ron down on the white sheets.

She had taken one look at him, and then promptly ordered the redhead to strip (which had caused his ears to redden, despite his condition) after which she clapped her hands together once in a strange hand sign.

And her hands had glowed green.

Ron had been healed, and the woman had asked if he wanted to be put into sleep for an hour or two, to which they had slowly agreed once it became obvious that Ron wouldn't be going anywhere until he had a few minutes of shut-eye.

All the time, the woman was quiet. She answered simple questions with _"My name's Tora", "Yes, I'm very, very old", "This is neutral grounds", "It's my duty as a healer to help those in need"_, but otherwise did not speak. No questions, nothing that said she knew who they were. There was not an instant where she left their side; she had no way to call any Death Eaters or Ministry officials. At least not that they noticed or could think of.

They had left that morning, and had never told her their names. She had not wanted to know, so they had not bothered. They had not dared.

As it was, they showed up again only months later, when they were just about to go to the school to get the last object for their mission.

Tora had not asked any questions; simply letting her glowing hands roam a few times over their backs and chests – healing an odd cut there or an old wound there. When she saw the scar on Harry's forehead, she said nothing, simply put a glowing finger at it and snatched said digit back when a dark mist snapped threateningly at her finger, like the sharp jaws of a cornered animal. She had eyed the scar for several seconds, before meeting his eyes.

"_Ouch",_ she had said simply, obviously not referring to the incident just then, but to something that had happened far back in the past. _"Stings a lot, I imagine."_

She had not mentioned it again, nor seemed to actually realize who he had to be. Or at least, she didn't seem to care. The scar on Hermione's chest seemed to fascinate the woman far more, to their amusement, and the healer had spent a long time studying it through the girl's clothing (the boys refused to leave them, so she had not been able to remove the piece of offending fabric, though Tora hadn't really seemed to mind, as she was fully capable of doing whatever she was doing anyway) with her glowing hands hovering an inch above the shirt.

_"A very interesting scar", _she had commented once. _"Not dangerous, and a memory of a big drabble most likely. Not something that should be meddled at, anyhow. A memory is a memory. Shouldn't meddle with what doesn't hurt you."_

When one of Harry's children became sick, he did not bring them to the hospital if he got to choose, despite what others thought about it. For one, Tora never expected any answers. She just accepted their appearance, healed them and shooed them off on their merry way. For the other, no reporters or fan could pop up there, and if there was one, they were firmly kept in a bed far from him and or his family, with Tora protecting him (though she would grin constantly). Also, she accepted not only wizards or witches, but any creature from a squirrel to a centaur or unicorn. As long as it obeyed the neutrality, she would heal it.

There was also one thing; she did not keep any kind of record of what she did or who she did it to. This was a great reassurance to the wizard hero, who did not like enjoy appearing in any sort of document. Merlin only knew he was and had been in enough of those already.

But she truly was a bizarre woman. For one – her appearance was more of something that he expected of the late Tonks (or Mrs. Lupin as she had been later). With short cropped, startling bubblegum pink hair that spiked slightly, kept out of her face by a black ribbon, she looked far younger than she claimed, and _had_ to be. Whereas she hinted that she could possibly be several centuries old, her looks were that of a twenty year old. Huge, emerald green eyes much like Harry's own would take in the room with the same amount of paranoia as old Mad-Eye Moody – only with an obvious pride in her work and confidence in her abilities that made her the easily most important and attention-grabbing thing or person in the room.

She would after the end of the war, when he was not at work and his family was not at home, let him just sit in her house and watch her bustle about a centaur, or even a normal non-magical human who had hurt himself in the forest. In the case of the later, she didn't wake him up – just brought him in unconscious (no doubt from a painful hit in the head courtesy of the woman herself) healed him and then dropped him off just as out cold wherever she had found him. The man would know nothing of what had happened, and Tora would not mention the man again.

He watched her a lot. Her every movement was precise and wasted not an ounce more energy than necessary to pass by. She glided over the floor like a ghost, impossible to hear or sense as she suddenly was at your side and you realized that you had no idea if she just appeared there – or if she had been there for an hour already.

As he became older, he realized she was actually quite famous in the world. People came from all over the world to have her heal them; Dark and Light and Neutral, Tora helped them all without question.

One time he startled her as he came in through the door. She had not jumped or gasped or even shrieked; she had fallen into a crouch and flung one of her strange daggers at him before he could see that she had moved. Then she was standing right in front of him, easily catching the dagger in mid-air, (as if realizing what she had just done) before whirling to punch him in the face so hard that he flew straight out the still open door; roaring in rage as she did so. She had healed him up directly afterwards, but made sure to do it with a lot of heartless slaps in the face and on his arms; as if to wordlessly tell him how he had misbehaved. How close he had been to death in that split second. As it was, he had just ended up with a couple of broken bones, a smashed face and a broken spine. It was nothing she had not been able to fix in a few hours.

He wasn't sure of what she actually was. She claimed to not be a witch, yet she healed any wound she came in contact with in a way that he had never heard before. No one knew _how_ she did it, either. She would simply place her hands in a few strange signs and sometimes mumble something unintelligible under her breath, before letting her hands hover above skin as poison was drawn out with water, wounds mended and cells duplicated at her command. Though most things were of the kind that any (incredibly) skilled medic witch could accomplish with some spells; it was the speed and effectiveness that was so incredible. Magic tended to hurt, sting or even knock you out once it was done treating you, but Tora did her healing without anything but a distant pleasant, warm feeling in the infected or wounded area.

He asked her once why she did this; why she would without a thought let a Dark Lord into her house and minutes later heal a non-magical or half-breed or member of a Light organization like the Order.

_"I swore an oath"_, she had said after staring at him for several long minutes that had made him want to squirm in his seat at her small coffee table. _"An oath to save anyone who came to me to be healed. This is what I have chosen to make out of my time on earth. It's what matters the most to me."_

Harry, as the Head of the Auror Office, made it a point of getting out of the Ministry every once in a while. And while Tora would never give him any information, nor let him talk to her patients about anything informative, she did let him into her library on his longer stays; if he behaved and didn't ask to be let in, that is. She was a very temperamental woman who would send you careering through the forest at speeds one hundred miles per hour with a single flick of her finger if you dared oppose her rules; spoken or unspoken. And mentioning her small personal library was taboo.

The library itself, if it could be called a library at all, was not very big; actually, it was more of a big cupboard in her kitchen where she had stored a small collection of old tomes and scrolls that all seemed to be so old they should not possibly hold together in one piece. Several didn't. To access the small room (barely a few meters wide) Tora would bite her thumb and press the bleeding digit and hand to the door, which would cause black markings to appear around it. Like snakes the beautiful symbols would curl and create a strange pattern, before glowing eerily crimson and disappearing. Harry never mentioned it. He knew that if the Ministry heard of this particular little secret they would classify it as a Blood Ritual and therefor Dark Magic, which would get her a one-way ticket straight into Azkaban for who knew how long. Though he himself did not think it was any sort of Blood Ritual (in the wizard sense of the word, at least) he would easily accept that it may be Dark or at least Gray Magic. Tora, while using no magic that he had ever heard of before, was not one to care if something was deemed dark or light by others. She used what she knew to follow her call, and perhaps it was why Harry didn't care to ask or mention it even to his friends and family. And even if the Ministry heard of it, he somehow, for some reason unknown to even his own mind, did not believe for a second that they would actually manage to bring her to the infamous prison. If she could cause earthquakes with a stomp of one foot, heal the dying and send one flying at incredible speeds through any obstacle with one nonchalant flick of a finger, he felt as if she would be able to escape a few Aurors trying to bring her to prison.

Then one day when Harry arrived at the small house, it seemed at first to be completely void of anything living. He had only a few times seen the place without other patients; often there were multiple staying at the same time. When he walked in, knocking on the frame of the open front door as he did so, he saw a blond man sitting at the coffee table Harry himself usually occupied during his stays.

The man was tall and lithely built, dressed in baggy black pants and a black turtle-neck sleeveless shirt that showed of the long, lean muscles on his tanned arms. His shocking yellowish blond hair stood in every direction in a manner that exceeded Harry's own messy hair with several miles, and a pair of slit, cerulean blue eyes darted to Harry's face as the stranger downed a small ceramic bottle of what looked like white alcohol.

_"Ah, it's you!"_ had Tora exclaimed, swatting the man half-heartedly on the head as she talked. _"This is Gama."_ She said when she noticed Harry's tense stance. There was something simply not completely… _right_ with that man. _"I'm sorry, Harry Potter."_

His eyes had widened and he had stared at the pink-haired woman, who after all these years looked younger than him; still twenty years old whereas he was in his early forties. A small, gentle smile spread over the woman's porcelain face and she patted him on the arm.

_"I knew who you were before you stepped foot in my house, Harry."_ She had smiled sadly, looking at the man sitting silent in his chair, observing them with intelligent, war-hardened eyes. _"Gama and I will be leaving today, dear",_ had she continued. _"It seems… I am needed somewhere else right now."_

_ "Everyone misses you, Tora-chan", _hadthe man said with a nod, as if it explained everything. And to the two – who Harry was sure were not completely human – it probably did, too. And so Harry could only watch as Tora and Gama picked up a few scrolls from the table, put them in their pockets and walked to the door.

_"I'll leave those books and scrolls to you, my boy", _Tora had said with a grin._ "I know you love them. The seal on the door is gone; you may take them with you home and show that book-loving friend of yours. I'm sure she will love them as much as you do."_

That was the day when Harry Potter watched one of the Wizarding World's greatest enigmas walk out the door, her pink hair lifting gently in the breeze. She didn't look back; simply walked through the forest with her friend until she was no longer in seeing or hearing rage from the small wooden house. And then the two were gone from the face of earth.

Harry did as he had been told, and brought the books and scrolls home, where he and his family and friends shared the knowledge possibly hidden there for centuries. Many years passed, and they had almost forgotten the strange woman who had once lived in a house in the middle of a backwater forest in nowhere Scotland. They seldom thought of the young lady who had opened her house for anyone and everyone, effectively showing the world that there could be a place, which could be called _neutral_. Safe.

And in one of the books, there was a small note written on a piece of parchment that they would never have noticed had it not been for his son Albus, who had lifted the book over his head while teasing his little sister; making the piece of parchment fall out and land at Harry's feet.

As he picked it up, he could see the ink glow crimson red for a second and the picture of a pink-haired woman, her big emerald green eyes narrowed in concentration as she held her glowing hands over her patient, flashed before his eyes. His equally green eyes read the note carefully, and then he smiled, before putting the piece of parchment carefully in the small chest where he kept the small mementos of his long, adventurous life. Then he turned to his wife, kissed her and smiled to the rest of his family, spending the rest of the day with those who mattered the most. When Harry lay on his death bed, a hundred and fifty years old and surrounded by his family, he could see her standing there in a corner, a small smile on her face. Her pink hair was a little shorter than he remembered, and there was a small scar under her eye that seemed to be many decades old, but otherwise she looked just like she had that day when he and his friends first stumbled inside her house in the woods. The others looked at her, but did not say anything. They had, in passing, heard of her, if not from him then from someone else who he had told.

She nodded at him, gesturing to his family. She knew he was proud.

And so, he closed his eyes, a small content grin on his face as he made himself ready to meet his wife on the other side.

_**As long as there are people in need; I will be there. After all, I swore an oath. What matters the most to you, Harry Potter?**_

He knew what he would tell her now. He knew exactly what meant the most to him, what he had lived for his whole life up to this point, and why he would accept death without complaint or worry. No sorrow and no regrets. And so he opened his eyes and took in everyone around him.

"Those I love."__

_**-Break—**_

_**Well, that was it. English is not my parental tongue, so excuse any misspellings… **_

_**I leave it to your imagination to decide how Tora (Sakura) and Gama (Naruto) could be immortal, or how they lived so long without aging (if you don't think they really were immortal…).**_

_**No real plot perhaps, but I had rather fun writing it anyway.**_

_Tora_**: ****(Japanese) means Tiger**

_Gama_**: (Japanese) means Toad**

_**READ AND REVIEW!**_


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